New Kansas City Partnership targets Coal

Authors: Richard Mabion
Richard Mabion is a Green For All Academy Fellow.
We all want change, right? We all want green jobs, wind turbines, solar panels and energy independence, right? How do we get it? Hoping and wishing isn’t enough anymore – we must ask for what we want! We have a small window of opportunity to ask for a strong energy plan, which will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and put us on track to the clean energy future we deserve.
Hello, this is Richard Mabion, Green For All Academy Fellow, and I am thrilled to tell you of a partnership my organization, Building A Sustainable Earth Community (BSEC), the founders of the Breaking The Silence (Environmental) Conference in Kansas City, Kansas, has recently formed with our Kansas Sierra Club.
While the Sierra Club will be busy tackling the world’s environmental challenges, BSEC as their partner will be making sure the views and needs of the low-income community are also represented in their agenda. Therefore, I am personally looking forward to the possible national model that this Kansas partnership could one day become.
The Sierra Club has just launched a campaign that asks the Obama administration to take advantage of the “clean slate” opportunity they have before them. Building A Sustainable Earth Community sees this Sierra Club initiative as being in line with our own mission to design a community that works for all people. By requiring the coal industry to be accountable for its pollutants, clean energy technologies will proliferate as we turn away from coal. With a swift transition to a green economy, we will realize “green-collar” jobs that will boost our economy and clean the environment.
Through a series of grassroots and online actions, activists are urging the Obama administration to jumpstart a clean energy economy by doing the following:
• Reduce global warming emissions quickly by making it possible for over a dozen states to implement their clean car requirements.
• Require new and existing coal power plants to limit their global warming emissions.
• End destructive mountaintop removal mining by stopping coal companies from being allowed to dump rock and waste into valleys and streams.
• Restore America’s international leadership in the fight to end global warming by publicly committing the US to cut its CO2 emissions at least 35% by 2020.
So let's join forces and ask the Obama administration to heed these Sierra Club
recommendations and do what they can to stop this mad coal rush.